When I was a girl growing up in New England, Robert McCloskey’s award-winning children books were a staple of my childhood reading list. Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal… but lately, the one that my mind has been wandering back to is A Time of Wonder. In its watercolor pages, a hurricane shakes Penobscot Bay in the midst of an idyllic summer.
And after the storm passes, the island is left quiet and changed, sea salt decorating the window panes like frost, and giant trees downed, uprooted, creating caverns of ancient treasure at their roots – arrowheads and pottery older than the trees themselves – and fallen skywalks of their leafy trunks. It’s changed, but it’s beautiful. Sometimes the calm after the storm is the point. Sometimes, the beauty is in the mess.
This year, I’ve found that the higher the elevation, the deeper I can breathe, the clearer my head, and the lighter my thoughts. The higher the elevation, the more likely I am to feel my breath rasp, purposefully, in my lungs, my legs burn from some small effort, and my shoulders and jaw unclench. Summer in the mountains is a verdant escape. The soft flutter of aspen leaves is hypnotically relaxing, the fall of a hidden waterfall riotously gorgeous. Birds call. Marmots chirp. It’s a constant conversation.
I’ve never particularly enjoyed being cold. I don’t ski. I don’t ice skate. I don’t actively seek out toboggan hills. But there’s something about winter that throws everything into sharp relief. Maybe it’s the annual realization that Nature is always bigger than we are, that we can acclimate, adapt, adjust… but in the end, we’re only visitors, ultimately headed back inside. Much like standing outside on a night deep with stars, winter reminds us that we’re perfectly small and insignificant, both connected to the universe in an elemental way, and also, comfortingly, a footnote to it.
In the winter, the air is sharp in our lungs before we begin to move within it. We are a series of contradictions. The cold air against our faces, the tops of our ears, the tips of our noses, waking us up, but bundled in practiced layers, our core is warm. Winter is a reminder of everything we can’t control, and conversely everything we can.
Recently, I was alone on a winter’s morning in a quiet wood. I had with me a borrowed dog, whose incarnate joy was soul affirming. My feet made a soft, muted sound as I walked, the feel of softened pinecones giving way under my boots. The frosted ground, the fallen trees, sharing their treetop secrets with the forest floor, brought me back to A Time of Wonder.
The world is loud. Our lives our loud. Our heads are loud. Sometimes, in the middle of it all, we need to go to where the storm has passed, and take a quiet walk in a cold, winter wood, and wrap ourselves in being simply a tiny spot of quiet joy in an endless universe.
